The Dork Forest

Dork on Dork Dialog with Jackie Kashian. I am interested in whatever dorky thing you want to talk about. Guests speak to their love of books, TV, Movies, Comic books, websites, food, wrestling, cars, action figures and bees. There is room for all in The Dork Forest. This is a safe space.
Credits:
Music composed and performed by Mike Ruekberg (Sarah Cohen on intro)
Audio fixes by Patrick Brady
Website design by Vilmos

Julie Hoverson makes fabulous audio dramas. She writes, directs, produces and performs in three ongoing series. She knows her old timey radio, Lovecraft and the writing craft. LARPing is discussed and I try to keep up. It’s great, tune the hell in.

Remember: November and December are “do not donate” months. Donate to a foodbank or the Hurricane relief or someone else. January… donate to me. $100 would be great. Just saying.You CAN order US made TDF shirts and comedy (also US made) for the holidays if you have dorky loved ones.

I do recommend QUIET PLEASE. "The Thing on the Fourble Board" is perhaps the one to start with, but it was pretty consistently good:
http://archive.org/details/Quiet_Please

And, yup: Sonia Greene and Lovecraft married. They collaborated on some writing. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?77553

over two years ago

JackieKashian

You recommend Quiet Please? I HAVE seen the first 4 eps of the wire... first ... six I think. Lovecraft married a Jew? SWEET!!

over two years ago

Todd Mason

1920s-1950s radio, as you might guess, was a Whole Lot Like 1950s-onward television, only with more music and less dancing. Wyllis Cooper's QUIET PLEASE is even better than his or Arch Oboler's LIGHTS OUT. Archive.org is your best one-stop shop for archived older (and some newer) radio (and film and tv and other) files...

You can watch just the first four episodes of THE WIRE, and it will give you a sense of how much you need to watch. But each season, while it builds on the previous season, is all but another series (each season has a different focus).

L. Ron Hubbard actually began writing pro in the 1930s, a decade after Lovecraft started writing for money. Not too comparable, except both wrote a lot of junk. Lovecraft was given over to writing pseudo 18th-century prose even at his best…and not nearly as well as, say, Tolkien recreated Romantic and earlier prose. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?645 (Bloch liked to note that Lovecraft was attempting to use heightened language, in part, because he couldn’t practically spell out his imagery for his markets. I suspect special pleading was involved there.) Lovecraft eventually married, toward the end of his short life, to a Jewish woman, and by that point was very sensibly ashamed of the racist, anti-Semitic, and to some extent misogynist commentary he’d make in correspondence and occasionally in his fiction.

Machen and such contemporaries of Lovecraft as Algernon Blackwood were exploring the kind of existential horror that was HPL’s major contribution, but not as obsessively. Lovecraft also corresponded endlessly with a circle of writer and fannish friends that included such contemporaries as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert (Conan) Howard, and such beginners who would pick up Lovecraft’s ball and run (better) with it as Robert Bloch (PSYCHO, vast amounts else) and Fritz Leiber (CONJURE WIFE, “Smoke Ghost,” vast amounts else).

That was more the A plot of FRANKENSTEIN, the responsibility for one’s creation (the major scientific bits that inspired young Mary W/S was experiments with “galvanism”…early explorations of how electricity seems to “re-enliven” dead flesh (or at least cause muscles to spasm).